Word: offbeaters
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Author Grau tells of these offbeat, touchy folk with the air of a summer visitor who is too intelligent and human to write them off as simply quaint but not sufficiently involved to look beyond their idiosyncrasies and surface emotions. A young girl suffering from growing pains has a couple of grubby love affairs. A boy courts a girl on a neighboring island, and so freshens an old feud that results in senseless violence. Ancient Mamere
...Since the price of military hardware is rocketing (e.g., a B58 costs $8,000,000, the projected B70 "chemical bomber" may cost as much as $20 million), where can cuts best be taken? One favored answer: in manpower, by cutting active forces, reserves and National Guard contingents. One offbeat item that could cut the budget to the tune of $10 billion: an efficient reconnaissance satellite that would keep the U.S. so well posted on the movements of any potential enemy that it might be able to trim its estimates of the losses to be suffered in surprise attacks...
...through seminary fastest and guarantee the best posts-"the 'how-to' courses which will make them the skilled technicians and craftsmen for whom the best market waits." The unmarried student, on the other hand, has more freedom to grow in breadth and depth by ranging through the offbeat areas and collateral readings. "Is there not some danger," asks the Century, "that men who spend seminary time learning to be homemakers are thereafter too apt to be at home in the church as it is and to let the church be at home in the world...
...vision fogs, the boy cultivates a world of offbeat characters where the ironies of life are less barbed and the humor less sardonic. There is a tramp who lives on baked potatoes and slugs of brandy. There is an alcoholic street singer, a kind of turn-of-the-century Bing Crosby ("Boo-boobooboo-boo"). And there is Grandma from Sweden who chews pipe dottle and comes to Denmark fully intending to die, but lives on to plague and embarrass the boy's mother with her unhousebroken back-country habits...
...offbeat nightclubs and twice a week on NBC Radio's Nightline (Tues. and Thurs. 9:10 p.m., E.S.T.), Comic Sahl has been convulsing audiences with his chip-on-shoulder, seemingly ad-libbed yuks. Not everyone has been convulsed. A bitter, nervous type, Sahl talked himself right out of two TV contracts by tactlessly placed sallies, offended network brass by opening one NBC spot with: "Well, kids, if we're good today, General Sarnoff might like us, and if he likes us he'll go to Charles Van Doren and get us more money...